Rhizome (Gilles Deleuze & Félix Guattari, A Thousand Plateaus)

​

In my work I sketch, scribble and catch intriguing thoughts, images in the moment. I experience this constantly. I draw from distinct studio practices, and yet when I map things out, unexpected crossovers appear. This is not something I construct deliberately, it surfaces through my reflective notes, through language that reveals itself on the page. And then I begin to recognise it in my body: similar impulses, intuitive thinking, the same quality of decision-making arriving from somewhere I can't quite name

​

What happens when I sketch in this way? Rhizomatic theory (Deleuze and Guattari, 1987) resists linearity, there is no clear beginning or end, hierarchy shifts or dissolves, and new surprising connections emerge. When sketching I experience this as a live connection between movement and paper. As Deleuze and Guattari write, "the map is open and connectable in all of its dimensions; it is detachable, reversible, susceptible to constant modification" , Deleuze and Guattari (1987). For me this is not only a theoretical proposition. It is a description of how I actually work.

​

My dance practice does not develop along a single trajectory, it spreads laterally, makes unexpected connections, and resists resolution. When I look at the mind maps and drawings I make during practice, lines branching outward, looping back, crossing unexpectedly, I recognise the rhizome not as an abstract concept but as the actual shape of how I work.

​​

Embodied Knowledge, (Maurice Merleau-Ponty, Phenomenology of Perception)

​

Merleau-Ponty places lived, bodily experience at the centre of how we know the world. The body is not a tool of the mind, it is the site of perception, understanding, and meaning-making.

 

For me this is a matter of fact, beginning in the body. We exist in our bodies and the knowledge we carry there is not separate from who we are. It is who we are.

 

I work with dance in the moment, simultaneously and persistently. I facilitate, I practise, I collaborate, and I do not compromise. All of it through the body.

​

My recent work on NOT YET de(part) offers a live example of this. The documentation brings together material from two performances, tracing a transition between processes rather than presenting a finished whole. It is itself a rhizomatic document.

 

The instant writing and inner dialogue that follow each movement session are attempts to stay close to that knowledge before it dissolves.

A very recent discovery has opened an entirely new channel between movement and articulation. During SIB Dance Lab 2026 (14–19 June 2026), my collaboration with Dr. Jorge Crecis and Diego Marin introduced me to the possibilities of instant voice recording with automatic AI transcription. The experience was, quite simply, revelatory. It opened up what is now possible at the intersection of embodied practice and digital technology. Through this method I have been able to capture fleeting, embodied thoughts that before slipped away entirely, too fast, too physical for writing alone to catch.

​

This discovery is so recent it is still unfolding. It has already changed how I think about documentation, and about what it means to move knowledge from the body into language.

This research does not begin with a fixed method which I apply to the practice. I recognise that the methodology is itself emergent, it develops in response to what the practice demands. As one of my early process maps puts it, this is about allowing time to pass, to grow and develop without forcing resolution. I like to visit Thinking Fast and Slow by D.Kahneman, and often reflect upon wheather the fast thinking ( intuitive and emotional) indeed can happen slow. 

The primary site of inquiry is my own movement practice, conducted as a solo investigation over six weeks, following my existing working schedule and artistic routines. In selected instances, other participants are invited into the space for shared movement explorations, expanding the solo inquiry through encounter and what I call meeting the others.

​

The research methods include:

• Movement practice — sustained, regular engagement with my own moving body as the primary research instrument

• Instant writing — writing immediately after or during movement, capturing experience before reflection smoothes it into narrative

• Drawing and sketching — visual thinking that bypasses language; the charcoal drawings in this archive are not illustrations of movement but movement translated directly into mark-making

• Inner dialogue — attending to the voices, impulses, and resistances that arise during practice; what I have long called the movement from within

• Video documentation — selected recording of movement explorations to enable return, reflection, and analysis

• Mind mapping — spatial, non-linear thinking on paper; tracing the connections between movement qualities, materials, environments, and states

 

These methods are not hierarchical. They are used in combination, with the emphasis shifting depending on what the practice calls for on any given day. This flexibility is not a lack of rigour — it is the rigour, responsive to an object of study (the moving body) that cannot be pinned in place.

​

This approach aligns with practice-led research methodology in the arts, where the practice is both the method and the outcome of inquiry. The emergent quality of the methodology mirrors the rhizomatic structure at the heart of the conceptual framework: no fixed entry point, no predetermined destination, only the practice, unfolding.

One of the central commitments of this research is to resist the separation of theory and practice. The theoretical frameworks are not applied as an afterthought, they are encountered through the practice, tested and complicated by it.

​

Deleuze and Guattari's rhizome becomes tangible when a movement unexpectedly connects to a gesture from a different project, a different year, a different body. Habitus reveals itself in the automatic, in what my body does before I decide to do it. And Merleau-Ponty's claim that the body is the site of perception becomes undeniable in the experience of instant writing: words that arrive from the body, not from the thinking mind.

​

This section will grow across the research period to include video excerpts, sketches, written reflections, and analytical notes. These materials are not illustrations of the research, they are the research.

This MA research emerges from, and speaks back to, a body of artistic practice developed over many years. Projects such as FRAMED, Exploratorium, and Et lite stykke kunst are not simply prior works; they are part of the same ongoing inquiry into movement, space, and the body.

​

My recent collaboration on NOT YET de(part), with AAIS, KHIO, and Færderbiennalen, is perhaps the clearest example of this way of working. The project came into being through a series of coincidences, a willingness to say yes, and a capacity to immerse fully. It was too large and too fast for a linear, structured approach. It had to be allowed to emerge, through the movement itself. Some projects cannot be planned into existence. They have to be moved into existence.

This thinking feeds directly into my current module, RSPG4, which is nearing completion. As part of this work, I have given myself a six-week research frame, a self-designed structure for collecting reflective journaling of my own practice. Within this period I am tracking shifts in movement quality, asking what changes when I am also a researcher watching myself. I am attending to moments of shift or surprise, still sitting with what they mean and where they lead. And I am looking for points of integration, where a theoretical concept suddenly feels true in the body.

​

Reflecting on this process, what I notice is that staying with it, moving slowly and without force, and allowing things to grow in their own time, is itself a methodology. There is a pull to give this everything. But reality does not allow that. The work coexists with a full professional life, with teaching, performing, facilitating, and all the other demands that do not pause for research. What I am beginning to discover, and this feels significant, is that this is not a limitation. It is a condition. The research lives inside the same multiplicity that has always characterised how I work. And something, slowly, is growing within it.

​

Progress is not always linear, and insight does not always arrive on schedule. What I am building is a capacity for sustained, attentive inquiry, a practice of noticing that runs alongside, and feeds back into, the movement practice itself. That practice is already pointing toward the next year. SIB Dance Lab, with its focus on Power/ Resilience / Emotion, is where this research is heading, a project that has long been central to my work and that now, through the lens of this MA, is ready to be examined more deeply.

​.

On 25 March 2026 I attended a session led by Angela Pickard, lecturer on the MA programme. The session focused on habitus and the social body, drawing on sociology and its attempts to understand human behaviour in social contexts.

What caught my attention was the idea that dance does not simply express identity, it forms it. I found myself asking: do I have a sociological lens? Am I looking at dance through one without having named it as such?

​

The concept of habitus, and the way skills, values, and ways of being become deeply embedded in the body, resonated strongly. It connects to questions I have been carrying throughout this research: how we look, how we move, how social connections are often already dance-related before we are conscious of them. The idea that we carry a social and cultural capital within our bodies feels directly relevant to my practice.

​

This is also where I find a new thread connecting back to power, resilience, and emotions, themes rooted in my work with Skisser i bevegelse (SIB), now seen through a sociological lens. The hexis, the bodily dimension of habitus, where thought, feeling, and physical presence are shaped together, opens up a new way of understanding the visible and invisible within my own dancing.

I noted in my logbook, with a heart around it: dance becomes you. I am still sitting with where that comes from.

​

The photograph comes from a project called Sketch, where I gathered people from my network, built over years, ranging in age from 25 to 65, varied in background and training, but united by a shared curiosity toward my artistic approach. We worked together for four hours, with improvised tasks directed by me and an audience invited to enter and at times move with us. At one point, an audience member with a saxophone paused at the edge of the room and asked: "Shall I? May I?" I reassured him, yes of course, this is what it is about. What followed between him and the dancers was open, generous, and genuinely risky. It was not guaranteed to work. Immediately after, one participant said: "I feel safe working here." In the context of habitus, I understand that as something more than comfort. Safety here was not the absence of risk. It was a shared trust while dancing and improvising, a recognition that something honest was present in the room. These are the people I return to. This is my home.

Through my research process, I have found that some of the most nourishing and generative moments have come through spontaneous conversations with peers who are working within the same field. These exchanges, often unplanned, just a quick "do you have five minutes?", carry a particular quality because both people share the same depth of context. There is no need for long explanation. Thoughts can be dropped into the middle and met with genuine understanding. Many shifts and realisations have revealed themselves through exactly these kinds of conversations.

​

A recurring challenge is that these moments are rarely recorded. The insight arrives and dissolves in the same breath. Going forward, I am looking at new tools to help catch what emerges in those conversations without losing the spontaneity that makes them work.

​

A recent collaboration offers a clear example of how I move through my career more broadly. When a peer recognised that we would be in the same country at the same time and wondered whether something might be possible, I said yes, openly, without scepticism, without needing to know the shape of it yet. I let the collaboration unravel rather than forcing it. I trusted the energy between us and the way the project revealed itself to me, even before I could rationally explain why it felt right.

​

When elements did not fit perfectly, the question became not how to force my vision, but how to use myself, my artistic values and ideas, as a kind of mediation. Finding the level where both things could coexist. Where the collaboration makes sense, feels interesting, and points towards something worth making.

​​

I believe I work through multiplicity to find simplicity in my expression. With a hare brain and a tortoise mind, in the spirit of Guy Claxton, I move through a busy and simultaneous landscape, trusting that what needs to surface will surface. This, I think, is how I trickle through my career, and how I step into the next year.